the house I thatched with reed stalks
by witchfingers
Summary: On the pier, Jin kills Kariya, and Kariya kills Jin. Because of this, Seizou doesn't die; and when the crows are chased away, Mugen wakes up to Fuu. Just Fuu. A dark AU-spinoff of chapter 26.
1. the rains of Hachijō-jima

**the house I thatched with reed stalks**

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 **I. the rains of Hachijō-jima.**

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He wakes up, and drops are falling on his face.

 _This is not a dream_ , his mind supplies, _it's raining_. He's on the beach of Hachijō-jima and the fog is on the rise, it's not cold, but his skin feels like it's on fire. It's the fever -he knows.

He remembers the rains of Hachijō-jima.

Heavy hands that seem without body hoist him up from under his armpits, roughly? Probably. He knows this place and he knows this rain, these hands have beat him a million times or something: he's inside a memory.

There's seabirds crying aloft, picking out the sand-filled eyes of the bloated ones who were a wee luckier than he was. But him, him they take in irons and at the point of many swords. He curses. He curses so much his parched throat is scratched raw; when he swallows he tastes blood.

It's a long way to the barracks. He relives this without remembering what his bare feet felt like, what his sunburnt arms felt like, what being led like a dog felt like. Without remembering if the needles entering his skin deeper than their depth are for malice or for his relentless struggling against the chains that bind him.

Despite his crimes, he gets, they say, more tattoos than he should, but mercifully less than he could, because he's 16 and he's been refusing to die for months. Because there are priests around- and one says that he (of all people) could have a destiny.

 _Well_ , he thinks, _fucking-tastic great. Maybe all along I was gonna be a hero._

That priest, he spits at him once his body lets him stand. They beat him up before he roughs him up, but his eyes cannot be tamed.

'Only hell can wait for you after this, punk,' says to him a guard restraining him.

He remembers. This new island-prison swallows his days and his nights and his months and his will to live; and it's even worse than his island-prison- _home_ , and he thought nothing could beat _that_ place.

 _I'll get out of here_ , he thinks, every morning, his eyes trained on the seamless yonder where the sea meets the sky. He'll go there, forget himself where the horizon is endless. _I'm gonna live._

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 _Hachijō-jima: one of the two prison-islands south of Edo, in the Edo period._

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 _to be continued  
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	2. headless jizō

_**[Author's Warning (to those who read the previous version of this chapter): it has been heavily edited.]**_

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* * *

 **II. headless jizō.**

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 _._

 _(before)_

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 _'Forgive me,' he said, 'I'm afraid my eyes cannot see very well these days'._

 _But _Kasumi Seizō_ believed he deserved to live in a world of shadows- it felt appropriate for him, who sought to do so much good, and caused so much suffering ___instead_._

 _The girl who was talking sound young and shaky, and she told him about her father. 'If I met him now,' she said, 'I wouldn't accept any excuses. I wouldn't forgive him.'_

 _I wouldn't forgive him…_

 _'I had it all planned. But this isn't fair. I can't do anything to you now, not if you're like this…'_

 _That was the journey's end. She knew it then. It ended with a victory and a loss cancelling each other, leaving her where she started: standing at the remnants of a house consumed by the fire._

 _'Fuu…', he said, feebly._

 _His sallow eyes opened to a silhouette against the doorframe._

 _They saw a ghost, instead._

 _'I don't think we'll see each other again,' her collected voice said, 'Goodbye…'_

 _She walked out, leaving all the ashes inside._

 _Outside, the sky was very blue and the wind was picking up, bringing from the sea the insistent crying of the gulls. She leaned against the door and sighed._

 _She felt then that she could almost see her mother before her, smiling proudly at her from a far-away place where it was always summer. Smiling as if she knew how little Fuu didn't mean what she said. After all the searching, all the healing. Her mother seemed to smile as if she knew Fuu will inevitably turn her wish for revenge into compassion for the consumed, dying figure in the hut._

 _She couldn't make such choice then, but her heart knew the outcome already. So she sagged to the ground, tears of defeat becoming tears of anger –she hugged her knees, and her tears were then tears of sheer sadness._

 _She lifted her eyes for a moment, everything seemed to quiet, but the world never stopped turning for anyone, and in her gut there set a sensation of inevitability._

 _._

 _As he lay on what he was certain would be his deathbed, Kasumi Seizō's eyes were seeing without seeing. He beheld, with pity in his heart, rows and rows of beheaded_ _jizō statues: the death of benevolence. And he asked himself: if that was the only fated outcome, then was the high price paid worth paying?_

 _'How meaningless to ask this question only now,' he thought._

 _._

 _Outside, an explosion, and the magnifying echo of an explosion, tore through the cliffs and hillside. It came from the beach, and time seemed to stop._

 _But it was the weight of time passing that crushed Fuu to a place so low she thought she might not withstand it: because then, suddenly, awareness struck and there before her was what she had lost, and what she might be losing at that moment, too. A scream destroyed its way out from her gut to her lips, and formed a name that was then heavier to spell than it had ever been before._

'Mugen!'

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 _beheaded_ _jizō statues: during the Shimabara rebellion, some Christians decapitated buddhist statues as a reprisal for being persecuted.  
_


	3. a castle on the waves

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 **III. a castle on the waves.**

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' _Mugen_!'

' _Mugen_!'

' _Mugen_!'

He feels _pain_.

Now he _is_ waking up, waking up _for real_ to the calling of his name. It sounds kinda sweet, his name, in how it's clearing the waters of death, chasing away the Hell that loomed so close before him.

Oh yes, because he knows well now, what the Hell will be like that awaits him, because past the screaming of the crows, he remembered the rains of Hachijō-jima.

'Mugen! You're alive!'

He is, he can tell because of the way the voice ( _Fuu's voice_ , something within recognizes), quivers. Fear is, after all, something he's only discovered being around her, and there's no way they'll meet there where he's going when he dies.

'Aw, shit, it's only you…' he manipulates his cracked voice to be a mask, 'I thought you were death for a minute there.'

Fuu's pained eyes meet his, and it's de-stabilizing the idea of how the one at whom they're looking is him.

Salvation-less, redemption-less _him_.

From above he would look not apart from a corpse. He becomes aware of the pebbles of the beach biting into his skin with polar-like edges, and of the sway of the waves, and he can pick apart all of the scents that compose the breeze: misty droplets and rotting seaweed, tideline debris and liminal sealife scampering into narrow crevices, waiting for the rising of the tide.

But the tide, it's ebbing now. He feels it in his bones.

'What about the sunflower samurai….?' (his eyes are open, but he can barely see her) 'D'ya meet him?'

She hiccups and nods, and he thinks her wimpy until he catches sight of the clotting blood that soaks the hem of her clothes.

 _Is that mine?_ His unfocused mind wonders. _Might as damned well be fucking mine…_

He is familiar with being angry, but not at his own wretchedness. But the feeling does not settle, rather dissolves with Fuu's broken trace of a voice.

'Lately all I seem to do is cry'.

Not many people can pick death from the tide, but, at least to Mugen, Fuu is proving to be one. For the second time, too.

If the gulls hadn't been crying aloft, maybe he wouldn't have even believed it. Because his gut told him, when he boarded that flimsy skiff to cross the island channel, that that would be his final journey. He was always mistrustful of islands and third-time's-charm: if the first one (his birthplace) had not killed him, and the second one (fucking prison-island south of Edo) hadn't either, surely his luck would run out on Ikitsuki island.

He sits up, tries to steady his vision. Slowly, the horizon becomes a straight line, as it should be.

'You think you can walk?' Fuu asks quietly, not flinching when dribs of that thick, dark blood of his splatter on the pebbles.

He uses his sheathed sword to support his weight. For a moment, he has the feeling that it's not gonna hold him, that it's gonna break- but it doesn't, maybe because it's a tool of fate, and he grunts.

'The fuck. Maybe I can, girly. But gimme a hand, 'ere'.

Fuu quietly lets him pass an arm over her shoulders. In that strange equilibrium, the beach is left behind with its bloodied pebbles and charred ruins, and sea-creatures that softly crawl out of the tidal pools, sniffing out the two corpses.

Not precisely sure _why_ , Mugen takes a last look at the placid sunset clouds, at the familiar intersection of sky and sea: the only things proven to be permanent in his life. And, if it's not gonna become his hell, Mugen thinks, then maybe this wretched place could become a fucking palace on the waves for them all- the dead and the living alike..

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 _It came to mind how, if Mugen knew about the legend of King Arthur, he would maybe liken Ikitsuki Island to Avalon._

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 _to be continued_


	4. morning promontory

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 **IV. morning promontory.**

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 _If you had a seed, where would you plant it?_

 _I would plant it on the cliff, where it would grow flowers red and wild, and the ships would see them from afar, and know that they are coming home._

He startles awake, and it's strange. That happens only so rarely to him, but never after almost-dying, not that he recalls. It takes some effort to bring a blue-ringed wrist to scrub his eyes (he can't move the fingers in his pierced hand yet).

What was that dream, anyway?

He asks himself that in hopes of dismissing it answerless, but he's faking it, 'cause he _knows_ \- that's his mother's deep voice and his own puny bratty voice, and one of either spewing some shit about 'home'.

It's dark around, so it must be night. He lies on a futon, so he must be inside, and there's other people with him, so it must be Jin and Fuu. Who knows _when_ it is, though. Who cares, too.

If he doesn't move, nothing hurts, but he feels like shit anyway, like someone placed a heavy stone on his chest in hopes that he sinks and drowns- but he won't, 'cause he's on land now, and on land the Crow Men guard him.

 _What…?_

And so, he goes back to sleep, and dreams dreams filled with dense undergrowth and tanagers, and the chapped, melancholy songs of the village elder.

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 _What is the duty of the dying?_

 _Would it not be to come to the aid of the living?_

Lying awake, Seizō muses. For a man with such unwavering faith in the kingdom of heaven, he is surprisingly reluctant to die.

To tell the truth, he never minded until now: he had abandoned all he loved, and left destruction in his wake, so it'd not been hard to abandon himself too; and as a shell wait for the moment of deliverance.

But it is all coming back to him now, slowly. It came back first with his little girl's careful whispers to Nakamura-san, his faithful retainer, and her careful, discreet fussing over the agonizing man she returned with, when she returned. He realizes it's not _him_ she wants to avoid disturbing, but that spindly, foreign youth.

Seizō is well at peace with that. Nakamura-san fills him in on what the man, or boy, rather, looks like, one day that Fuu is not around, and he puts together in his mind the picture of a kid who's done terrible things and paid for them, who didn't learnt from that and did it all over again, and again, who was probably too young for the long time he must have spent in prison (Nakamura-san mentions but cannot understand the tattooing). A kid who was never loved and found redemption anyway- Seizō knows it through his little girl's devotion to making the kid well again.

In the world of darkness he lives in, there are many things Seizō sees without his eyes, and much he can experience without moving, like the hitch in his daughter's breath when the boy coughs, (though he ignores how she now and then looks at _him,_ with eyes full of reluctant compassion) or the methodical check-up she does on the kid every day, the satisfied sigh she heaves before heading out very silently, as if she left in search of something- or someone?

(But Seizō also never sees how the last look she takes before leaving is a long, pensive gaze, directed at her father.)

In the world of darkness Seizō lives in, he also has plenty of time to think. And he thinks he might be proud of that boy that lies there, scarcely out of his reach, for most probably breaking out of the clutches of evil. In a way, perhaps, he could be the embodiment of the Christian meaning of redemption.

But then he hears his little girl's sigh of exhaustion, as she gets ready to sleep the night away, and he somehow feels he's even prouder of her.

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Mugen drowsily comes to to chirpy morning light, and the sound of quietened labored breathing, and a faint, but strange smell hanging in the air, like… his brow creases as he half-awarely scrounges to place that smell somewhere. It kind of brings the image of a brothel to mind, though he does not know it's wilting flowers he's smelling, and he loses interest immediately.

He can crane his neck enough to confirm his suspicions that the dude lying on the risen part of the floor is not Jin. Doesn't breathe like Jin, doesn't quite lie on his deathbed like Jin, and plain just doesn't _look_ like Jin.

 _So that bastard got ahead of me this time, huh._

He just isn't exactly sure what he means by _ahead_.

Although he knows he's better now, he still feels heavy as shit. Back in Ryuukyuu, some village broad taking pity on his pre-adolescent self would be tsk-ing, saying he's got kijimuna sitting on his chest _again_ , a whole family probably, because surely _one_ couldn't keep _him_ down.

Mugen frowns silently. He never thinks about the past –he'd like to know _what_ he did now that opened the fucking memory floodgate. Maybe it's the nearly-dying business.

 _Yeah, that's gotta be it._

He tries to get up, but he cannot, and he could crawl, maybe, but he's not doing that today. Not with a random dude lying there, probably sizing him up despite neither being much of a threat. He feels caged.

'Fuck this, this sucks,' he swears under his breath, 'Ain't there no-one here can give a guy some water?' His voice is raspy, rusted, feels like it belongs to someone else. And breaking that holy-weird kind of silence makes him cringe, unlike him.

'Everybody is out,' a quiet, worn voice replies.

Right. The dude. He'd almost forgotten. He grunts a response and thinks that's that, but then he asks, on impulse:

'The hell are you, buddy?'

The boy's way of talking does not even register with Seizō, who's been always among the poor, among whores, and beggars.

Criminals, too.

'Kasumi Seizō. And you?'

'You shittin' me?' he asks, uncommonly stoically, stealing a glance at the man, who is little more than a silhouette from his point of view.

Silence answers him, but what kind of answer had he expected, anyway?

'Figures I'd end up dyin' next to a guy like you,' Mugen says, eventually, even though he knows he won't really die this time, not if he's not gone yet, but wishing he could see the look on the face of Fate as it dealt him that one. And who knows. Maybe Fate had Fuu's face all along.

'Mugen, that's the name,' he breathes. 'Your brat travelled 'cross the whole damned country to find ya. An' guess she found ya, after all.'

'Yes...' says Seizō, slowly. 'And I am sorry she did. I'm a sad sight to behold.'

 _Aren't we all_ , Mugen's mind supplies. He groans, inwardly. 'Shut up, buddy. Make our pains feel at least a bit worthwhile.'

Seizō's lips part in a small, chapped smile.

'You're in danger just by knowing who I am, boy, and Fuu the most.'

 _Yeah, well,_ Mugen thinks, _I don't give jackshit about that. And that little bitch's a magnet for trouble without your help, anyway._

That's not what he says, though. What he says is,

'Yeah, whatever. What's-a sunflower smell of, anyway?'

'Nothing. Sunflowers have no scent.'

'The fuck, then...?'

'It's because they turn, towards the sun. They're flowers that follow the light, just like we follow God. Or, used to. All that, it's gone now.'

'Pretty shitty reason to leave your folks behind,' Mugen says, and he's honest. But the passing thought occurs to him, that he's saying something kind of like what Jin would say, and on Fuu's behalf. But it _doesn't_ occur to him how much that means he's been changing. His mind brings up the recollection of Okuru's eyes, and how they'd died through the death of his family.

He briefly wonders what this man's eyes look like.

'No day goes by in which I don't regret so much... I would have brought them with me, my beloved child and wife... (he coughs) But I made peace with myself, that I would rather have them live hating me, than dead because of my selfishness.'

'Girly's gonna love to hear this shit. Ya'll talked, already?'

Silence.

Then, 'Not yet.'

'Huh,' Mugen grunts, cranes his neck to take another look at the samurai with the scent of sunflowers, and closes his eyes. He's done damn enough talking about corny shit for the rest of the season, he hopes. The man's labored breathing quietly becomes part of the silence again, and Mugen remembers what he looks like: a wisp of a person lying there, half-bathed in a halo of light filtering through the poor thatching of the roof. Alive, dying, and dead, all at the same time.

No, his eyes won't look like Okuru's.

Mugen can tell that if the Crow-Men took their masks off, they would all look like him.

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* * *

 _kijimuna: mischievous little creatures in the Okinawan mythology. One of their most well known tricks is to lie upon a person's chest, making them unable to move or breathe_

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 _morning promontory: title taken from the album Utabautayun, by Asazaki Ikue, who sings Obokuri Eeumi._

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 _to be continued_


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